


tony wants his son peter to be happy

by wjjmwmsn5



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Gen, Irondad is the best dad, Trans Peter Parker, Trans Tony Stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 08:58:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11551869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wjjmwmsn5/pseuds/wjjmwmsn5
Summary: Tony just wants to support his trans son Peter.





	tony wants his son peter to be happy

**Author's Note:**

> Requested by anonymous on tumblr.  
> My url is transpeterparkers.

**** The first time Peter saw Tony after he turned down his offer to live with the rest of the Avengers, he wasn’t expecting him at all. He hadn’t been doing anything dangerous—Peter had decided that the criminals were just too scared to act out in Queens after Spider-Man took down the bird guy with the fancy weapons—nor actually noteworthy in particular. Actually, as it happened, when there was a knock on the door to Peter and May’s apartment, he and Ned were in his room, supposed to be studying but instead talking about the next Star Wars movie. Actually debating. Ned said that Rey was Luke’s daughter, but Peter was  _ emphatic  _ about her being Obi-Wan’s granddaughter. 

So not exactly when you would expect Tony Stark to show up at your door, whether you were Spider-Man or not. 

“Peter!” Aunt May called from the other room. She didn’t sound normal—not alarmingly different, but more like the kind of different that you called to your nephew who happened to be Spider-Man and whose superhero mentor, Iron Man, had arrived at the house. 

Peter looked to the door and then to Ned, standing up with a huff of breath. He had gotten comfortable, and had  _ just _ started in with all of his best points about why Rey was and should have been a Kenobi. Ned stood up too, and when Peter looked at him questioningly, he said, “It’s cold and here and I left my jacket in your living room.” Peter shrugged and walked out of his room.

When May found out about his superhero abilities and identity, she had been justifiably angry about the major secret he had been keeping from her, and all the danger he had been putting himself in. She at first insisted he couldn’t do that anymore, and then it was really emotional because she started saying stuff like  _ What if you had died, Peter? What if you get hurt?  _ and then Peter felt  _ terrible _ , but then he just panicked and called Tony, afraid that if it wasn’t one overbearing guardian taking away his suit, it was another. 

Well, maybe they weren’t being overbearing in this situation, but still.

She had spent a good ten minutes yelling at Tony Stark— _ Tony Stark _ , but if there was anyone who was going to yell at him unabashedly and without apologizing when she had a point to make, it was Aunt May—and then the next ten minutes with Tony on speaker phone, pacing through the living room and throwing up her hands every time Tony tried to explain. In the end, she had pointed to the phone as if Mr. Stark could see and said, “I can’t do this tonight.”

They had talked again the next morning. There was some begrudging agreement between the two of them, but some of May’s animosity hadn’t faded entirely. 

So he suddenly understood why she sounded strange when he saw Tony standing in the living room seeming a bit like May had chewed him out before calling Peter into the room.

Meanwhile, Ned’s jaw had reached the floor. 

“Oh, hello,” Tony said casually as he strode over to the two of them. “You must be Ned.”

Ned’s eyes were wide as he looked back and forth between Peter and Tony, and Peter was glad that this at least wasn’t how his best friend was finding out that he knew Iron Man, because otherwise he might have fainted. He certainly seemed like he was going to when Peter first told him that he was in a “Stark internship.” 

“You’re Tony Stark,” Ned said. “You’re  _ Iron Man.  _ Peter, Iron Man—  _ Iron Man is in your apartment. _ ”

Peter nodded and patted his friend’s shoulder. As much as he had seen of superheroes and Tony Stark in particular, it was still strange to see him standing on their floors, next to their couch, Aunt May’s arms crossed next to him and Ned next to him while in his presence. He guessed he had gotten used to being around Tony as Spider-Man, not Peter Parker. 

“Yup, Iron Man is,” Tony said. “And I think Iron Man wants a moment with Peter.” 

Ned nodded and Peter saw him looking at Aunt May with incredulity. Maybe for the first time, Ned was realizing that Peter wasn’t only a crime-fighting spider guy, but also someone who had met and fought alongside the Avengers. He wondered what he would do if Peter showed him some of the videos that he took while he was away on that mission. 

Tony put a hand on Peter’s shoulder and started to lead him away from the living room. With Ned there, he had forgotten that Tony didn’t just show up at his house, so there was some kind of reason for him to be there. Peter’s mind bounced quickly back and forth between  _ There’s another mission!  _ and  _ He’s taking my suit again _ , so he said, “What is it?” before they were even in the hallway. Tony just patted his shoulder and didn’t look down at him, which only made his heart race  _ faster _ . “What does it have to do with?” 

Tony peered into his bedroom to make sure that that was the room they were going in, and then the two of them went in. Peter shut the door behind them and looked at Tony expectantly, but he just looked vaguely uncomfortable and unsure of himself. And that didn’t lend itself to either of Peter’s theories, so now he was  _ really  _ confused. 

“Mr. Stark, please,” Peter said, “you’re killing me. What is it?” 

“I— Well, Tony. You can call me Tony, Peter.” 

He hadn’t expected that, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that you flew across state to talk to someone about, so his heart was still beating high in his throat and down in his stomach. “Okay, Mr. Tony— er, Tony,” he said, feeling the words flounder in his mouth as anticipation skyrocketed through him. 

“Okay.” Tony let out a breath and looked at Peter squarely. “I’ve been trying to do better by you than people did for me.” 

Peter’s brow creased and his eyes veered off as he tried to understand what that meant. “Okay… I think you’ve been really nice.” 

_ Really nice  _ was a little bit of an understatement when he thought about all that Tony had done to help along his transition. When he first started helping them, it had been weird trying to explain to Aunt May why Tony was helping out without explaining to her that they were connected via the Avengers, but she had accepted that they were close from the internship and Tony was generous. It was pretty surprising for himself, actually, and he was fully aware of the fact that he was Spider-Man. 

Tony just shrugged, though. “I was in the neighborhood and I thought it might be a good idea to talk a little bit more about why I took the suit,” he said. The moment it sunk in, Peter had to stop himself from groaning. All of that anticipation for a lecture? But he knew he was in the wrong, and probably deserved a lecture. And he was glad that Aunt May didn’t know about all the trouble he had been getting into then and how much he had disobeyed Tony, because he was sure that she wouldn’t like it a bit. A lecture from Tony was better than a lecture from May—if a bit more awkward.

Peter rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m really sorry about all that, Mr.— Tony,” he said. 

Tony nodded. “I think I owe you a bit of an apology too,” he told him. “I thought… I thought keeping an eye out on you was enough. And I wasn’t communicating with you. If I was, you wouldn’t have barged in on the FBI. That’s on me.” 

He could see that this was hard for Tony somehow, and he remembered something Tony said about his dad when Peter was on the ferry. He wondered for a moment, then, if Tony’s dad wasn’t exactly good. But then, what else could Peter take out of this except that Tony Stark considered  _ him  _ to be a son figure? And that was too— surreal. 

“And you shouldn’t have been lying to me and taking out your tracker and deactivating your training wheels,” Tony reminded him, and he shrunk a little bit and rubbed the back of his neck more. “But I think we can move on from that.” 

“Are you going to tell May?” Peter asked. “If you think we need to, I can tell her. I don’t think she’d—” 

“She already suspected and she asked me about it,” Tony said, cutting him off. “And I think, since she knows now, telling Aunt May might need to start becoming more of a thing.” Tony sat down on his bed and looked up at Peter. “Come on, sit down. Let’s have a moment.”

He paused. “A moment?” he asked, but he stepped over to his bed and sat down as well. He looked up at Tony, and briefly he wondered how hard May was having to restrain Ned from bursting into the room to talk to Tony and ask him a million questions. 

“Yeah, we’re going to have a moment,” Tony told him decisively. He let out a breath. “Pete, I want you to feel like you can talk to me and I’ll listen.” 

Peter nodded. The situation was quickly going from anxious to just plain uncomfortable, and he wasn’t sure where Tony was trying to take this. But he hadn’t felt like anyone was listening to him, not when he went to the ferry. He had texted Happy a million times, and for a while he thought that maybe Happy just didn’t like texting, but the more that happened, the more he came to the conclusion that unless he was useful, they didn’t need him around. And if they were going to treat him like a child after he went to Germany to help in their stupid fight, he felt like he had to take matters into his own hands. It was nice hearing that Tony had been listening the whole time, but he had been wondering if he would show any indication of that in the future. He guessed this was proof that that was true, but it felt like a very serious conversation with adults, and he hated those. 

“I’ve been afraid that I’m going to mess something up here,” Tony went on when Peter didn’t say anything. Maybe he expected Peter to say something sincere in return, but his mind was scouring for jokes to make to lighten the mood. “I want to give you the things you deserve, Pete, and I don’t want you to think I’m doing that out of obligation.”

“Well.” He was reeling for something to say, but nothing came to mind. “Thank you.”

“I want you to feel like you can talk to me,” Tony said, and it seemed like this was the hardest part of his speech because he relaxed a little bit once he said it. Peter looked at him blankly, unsure what he meant. “About more than just all this.” He gestured to where Peter’s Spider-Man suit was sitting slung over the back of his desk chair. 

More than just superheroes? He couldn’t imagine talking to Tony about things like what he got on his math test and what he wanted to do when he got older. Those were the conversations he had with May, but he guessed that that was the point. 

“You mean… you want me to… No, I don’t understand,” Peter said, shaking his head. 

“I don’t either, kid,” Tony said. He sounded so much like Uncle Ben for a second that Peter felt his chest feel tight with that pain. “I just want you to feel like you can talk to me.”

“Why?” was the first thing out of Peter’s mouth, and he didn’t really have time to think about how that might have been rude, because he was already launching into more. “What do I— I tell you about all my missions, I don’t understand. Are you— I mean I think it’d be a waste of your time if I just… ‘Hey, Tony, I got an A on my Spanish quiz today, have fun being Iron Man.’” 

“No, I don’t think it’d be a waste of my time,” Tony told him. Peter was at a loss for words. “You’re a good kid, Peter. I care about you. I want to know about how you are, I want to know if anyone’s a dick at school, I want to know how your hormones—” 

Peter stopped him by shaking his head. “Mr. Stark, I don’t— I get enough ‘your body is changing’ from May, and I don’t think you’d get it—” 

“I think I’d get it a lot better than May would,” Tony told him.

“Well, I guess so, you’re a guy, but—”

“Pete, I’m trans too,” Tony told him, with a little smile on his face like he hadn’t expected Peter not to know that. “You didn’t know?”

All of his life he had looked up to Iron Man, all of his life he had played with toy Iron Man masks, all his life he had watched as Tony Stark told the world he was Iron Man and fought all the bad guys and exuded everything that Peter wanted to be one day—and it turned out that he was trans too. All his life, when he was struggling with his gender, when the “Penis Parker” chants stung, his favorite superhero was trans too. He didn’t know what to say. It seemed like this conversation was doing that to him a lot.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Tony said. He put an arm around Peter’s shoulders and patted his back. “I get it. And I wanna be there for you.” 

Holy shit. 

He remembered thinking that Tony was going in for a hug in the car, the “We’re not there yet.” It had been awkward thinking of it every time it came to his mind since then. But right then he just felt like they were there, so he leaned over and hugged his hero. “Thanks, Tony,” he said. 

Tony hesitated, but no more than a second before he was hugging Peter back. “Hey, no problem, kid.” He pulled away from the hug and looked down at him. Peter felt so much admiration for his favorite superhero, but it didn’t feel like the normal way any kid admired Iron Man. It was that his favorite superhero was  _ Tony Stark _ . “Now, uh, I think your aunt wants to talk to you about the ferry business.”

Peter groaned. “Well, I think Ned wants to ask you a million questions.” 

Tony grinned. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said, standing up. “But maybe next time.”

Peter stood up as well and went over to the door, shaking his head. “Oh, no. If I have to get lectured, you have to answer  _ all  _ of Ned’s questions,” he told him. 

“I guess that’s fair,” Tony said, laughing. He patted Peter’s back again as they left the room.

Later, Peter would change “Mr. Stark” in his phone to “Tony,” and he wasn’t about to tell him just yet about his homework and his tests and his life to that extent, but it was enough. 


End file.
